Some songs are bilingual, some are straight English, some are straight Spanish. It really depends on when the song was written, how it was written, and what it talks about. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore nowadays, our best performance so far was in Canada where nobody spoke Spanish and everybody was singing our songs.

“But the thing that really convinced me was one photograph,” he said. “It was a group shot and in it was the image of a small African-American girl, dressed in the fashion from the early days of the firehouse. She wasn’t there. How’d she show up in the photo?”

Key West is a great place to live for writers because of its great writer vibe created by its long literary heritage from Hemingway to Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop to Philip Caputo, Tom McGuane, John Leslie and Robert Stone, to name a few.

Back then, Sloppy’s was the “locals spot.” They brought in a lot of diverse, cool music, a lot of national touring bands were playing there. I remember Leon Russell playing there, War, Pure Prairie League.